Game crashes should not count as losses!

Seasick Pirate

I know there's probably no way for the game to know the difference between a crash and a force quit. But I wish there was.
I'd put this under Bugs/Tech Issues but I don't know what is causing this. I'm not doing anything differently and we haven't had an update for a while. So I'll use this to whine about my problem in the guise of suggesting we don't lose points when the game crashes beyond our control.

Three times now during Nefarious Foes my game has crashed and quit on my phone. So agrivating when I'm actually doing well in this event (trying to stay top 20).

Just now I was finishing up a match. I hit the button to execute Daken's Chemical Reaction to finish off Moonstone's last 1200 health points. Instead of the animation showing, the game stops and hangs for a minute before finally quitting. So very aggrivating!

There's also the times when taking a phone call resets the game, also counting as a loss. That's annoying too but not the games fault. That's a limitation of the device I'm using. I have learned to let it go to voicemail until the match is over though.

Unknown

People would just find a way to crash their computer/phone while they're losing even if it was possible to distinguish between a crash and something else.

Unknown

If they gave something reasonable - one free crash per day - it'd be pretty hard to seriously abuse.

Pwuz_

I wish it would just save the current state of the game and omit the option to force quit out of a match.

If you don't select the retreat button, the game (in theory) could save it's current position, reload that position even after the phone/computer was turned off. That would prevent the risk of any abuse, while still giving some forgiveness for game crashes or poor memory prioritization.

Seriously, if I could send and receive text messages while playing, that would be great.

atomzed

Pwuz_ wrote:

Seriously, if I could send and receive text messages while playing, that would be great.

You can't?

I could do that on my s4. If an important text message come in, I can pop out to reply to the message. And pop in again.

FaustianDeal

atomzed wrote:

Pwuz_ wrote:

Seriously, if I could send and receive text messages while playing, that would be great.

You can't?

I could do that on my s4. If an important text message come in, I can pop out to reply to the message. And pop in again.

Since I moved to a 6plus on iOS 8 I can't reliably predict when an app swap will cause me to lose a game in progress. Camera or camera roll is a kiss of death, a text thread with a picture in it is guaranteed death, but minimal chat history sometimes flies okay.

I'm not sure we can 100% blame the game, some of the memory management on an iPhone is a result of insufficient physical memory and management that happens at the OS level.

The devs could try to identify the smallest amount of required data and try to save it to a state file so you could reload/return even from an explicit app closure. But as it stands now the game just goes into pause (in mid animation even) so that's a lot of memory to try to hold onto when someting else hungry is getting loaded.

Pwuz_

atomzed wrote:

Pwuz_ wrote:

Seriously, if I could send and receive text messages while playing, that would be great.

You can't?

I could do that on my s4. If an important text message come in, I can pop out to reply to the message. And pop in again.

Unless I'm currently on Wi-Fi, pretty much ANYTHING I do on my phone besides play MPQ will cause it to reboot when I start back up again. Even just letting it sit too long does it too now! I stopped playing mid-match to take dinner out of the oven, came immediately back, unlocked the phone and MPQ rebooted! No other apps used.

atomzed

Pwuz_ wrote:

atomzed wrote:

Pwuz_ wrote:

Seriously, if I could send and receive text messages while playing, that would be great.

You can't?

I could do that on my s4. If an important text message come in, I can pop out to reply to the message. And pop in again.

Unless I'm currently on Wi-Fi, pretty much ANYTHING I do on my phone besides play MPQ will cause it to reboot when I start back up again. Even just letting it sit too long does it too now! I stopped playing mid-match to take dinner out of the oven, came immediately back, unlocked the phone and MPQ rebooted! No other apps used.

Well, it doesn't sound like it's a mpq issue, because I can leave the game on for an hour, and I can still come back to it...

Do you have a memory killer or battery saving app that tried to kill app that are in the background? It may explain why mpq is "killed" when you leave in the background

Pwuz_

No, just iOS, which could be it's own set of issues as FaustianDeal mentioned. I'm on an old 4s as well, I was hoping getting the 6 would help with this issue.

It used to be more forgiving about stopping mid-match. I can remember back in March I could stop mid-match, go for a drive, use navigation & text messages, come back and not miss a beat. Over the course of a number of the updates to MPQ, this issue has gotten worse and worse.

I could try to blame some of this on iOS, but since I tend to sit on the older OS for a while, I know it was some update to MPQ.

atomzed

Pwuz_ wrote:

No, just iOS, which could be it's own set of issues as FaustianDeal mentioned. I'm on an old 4s as well, I was hoping getting the 6 would help with this issue.

It used to be more forgiving about stopping mid-match. I can remember back in March I could stop mid-match, go for a drive, use navigation & text messages, come back and not miss a beat. Over the course of a number of the updates to MPQ, this issue has gotten worse and worse.

I could try to blame some of this on iOS, but since I tend to sit on the older OS for a while, I know it was some update to MPQ.

Makes me glad that I'm on Android as I don't have this issue at all. My mpq is totally fine.

Unknown

Shoot! I'm losing. Better run the task manager and kill MPQ.exe, so that I don't lose.

They should work on game stability instead of implementing an abusable thing like this.

Pwuz_

KevinMark wrote:

Shoot! I'm losing. Better run the task manager and kill MPQ.exe, so that I don't lose.

They should work on game stability instead of implementing an abusable thing like this.

IF the game saved it's state like many other games do, the ONLY way to stop an existing battle would be 1 of 3 ways:
1: Win
2: Lose
3: Retrete (Treated as a loss)

If you quit the game, or your phone dies/crashes, internet goes out, or whatever; when you reenter the game it WOULD pick back at the exact spot you left off. Where is there potential for abuse in that system?

Unknown

Pwuz_ wrote:

KevinMark wrote:

Shoot! I'm losing. Better run the task manager and kill MPQ.exe, so that I don't lose.

They should work on game stability instead of implementing an abusable thing like this.

IF the game saved it's state like many other games do, the ONLY way to stop an existing battle would be 1 of 3 ways:
1: Win
2: Lose
3: Retrete (Treated as a loss)

If you quit the game, or your phone dies/crashes, internet goes out, or whatever; when you reenter the game it WOULD pick back at the exact spot you left off. Where is there potential for abuse in that system?

An autosave feature? Would be nice but I doubt they would implement it.